RIP Garcia Marquez Twitter Roundup

These days, social media seems to be the way I most often hear about breaking news. But as much as a truism as that’s become for me, I really can’t recall having seen such a diverse and sizable group of people on the same page about an event as when Gabriel Garcia Marquez died yesterday. A sampling of the outpouring on Twitter following a death . . .

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This outpouring has been pretty wide-spread indeed. To be honest, I’ve never really engaged with his work—I’ve read a few of his short stories, which I’ve somewhat liked, and I’ve heard a number of people whose taste in literature I trust tell me that A Hundred Years of Solitude is “completely overrated,” or something along those lines. I feel that maybe I’ve been unfair to Garcia Marquez’s writing, or at least have gone out of the way to read many other Latin American writers before getting to him. Given the recent news, and the things that people have been writing, I’m beginning to think that maybe this was a poor choice on my part. Thankfully I can change that! What work of Garcia Marquez would you recommend, Scott? From someone who already loves Borges, Cortazar, Bolano, & a million others from Sud America, before and after his time. Thanks.